This folding exercise bike can work your arms or your legs. It’s sturdy enough for serious workouts, with a price to rival full size equipment. When you’re done, though, it barely takes up space. Excy is like a polite houseguest: It stays out of your way when you’re busy, but it’s up for fun whenever you are.

We’ve covered other unusual exercise bikes here before, like the DeskCycle and the full sized FitDesk. Both of those are designed to give you a light workout while you do something else. But Excy is only a distant cousin to those. You can set up Excy (and yes, they call it “Excy,” not “the Excy,”) in front of your couch while you watch a movie, but I tried shoving it under my desk—no way. It’s big enough that your knees are going to bump up against the tabletop. On the other hand, it’s easy to keep Excy on hand next to your desk, and bang out a short workout when you need a break.

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Excy’s asking price is also a lot higher than those under-desk cycles. The DeskCycle currently goes for $159, and you can get other tiny bikes for as little as $30. For an Excy, though, you’re looking at at least $700. That’s competitive with some full size exercise bikes! It tries to live up to the price tag, though, by being super sturdy and versatile. This isn’t just a pedal-while-you-chill situation: Excy wants to be your go-to for intense workouts.

Excy Excels at Hard Interval Workouts

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While you can use Excy for steady speed workouts, it works even better with intervals. If you’ve done group cycling classes, you know the drill: twist a knob on the bike to get more resistance, and twist it the other way when you need to lighten up. Excy feels different than a spin bike, though, because there’s no flywheel. That means the pedal’s cycle won’t feel smooth until you get the hang of pushing evenly with each foot in turn.

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Here’s how you use Excy for hard workouts. Drape the yoga-mat-like Keeper over your chair, and hook its teeth onto Excy. Sit on the Keeper, and you can push as hard as you like without the little bike sliding forward. If the Keeper still slides—mine did, although Excy’s team says that’s unusual—you can secure it by wrapping the included toggle ties around the back legs of the chair. That did the trick, and I could pedal all-out without the bike budging.

You can use this with any chair, or even a couch. But then Excy gets really interesting when you realize you can set it up in more than one way—and even use it as an arm bike.

Excy Can Work Your Arms and Core

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It’s really hard to get a good cardio workout when you’ve injured some part of your leg. I know this from experience. So does Excy founder Michele Mehl: She broke her leg while the Excy was still in development, so she switched to using it with her arms.

Arm biking with Excy is no joke. I did the Arm Candy workout with the resistance cranked way up, and in just seven minutes I got one of the best arm strength workouts I’ve had in a long time.

The built-in pedals have only the tiniest nubs for traction, so it’s possible to just grab the sides of the pedals and work out that way without chewing up your hands. (You can also pedal barefoot during leg workouts.) The crank arms fit standard 9/16” pedals, so you could replace them with handles if you plan to do a lot of arm biking, or with your favorite cycling pedals if that’s more your style.

Between legs and arms, there are a lot of configurations for this little bike. I found the most useful ones to be:

Attached to a chair, with the Keeper, for a recumbent bike style workout.

On a sturdy table or countertop, and you stand on the Keeper to make sure Excy doesn’t slide forward.

On the floor, with the Keeper like a yoga mat; pedal with your feet and pick your butt up off the ground for killer hamstring engagement.

On the floor, but this time you sit at the base of the Excy and pedal with your arms.

I also tried pedaling with my arms while doing a plank, but the safety warnings say not to do that, so sadly, I have to recommend that you don’t. Excy’s website lists even more options, along with videos where you can follow along with great workouts for each position.

Where It Falls Short

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Twisting the knob shortens a strap around the center axle. The tighter the strap, the harder to pedal.

Excy doesn’t have solid downsides so much as quirks—things that will irritate some people, but that the Excy team spins as unique design features. See what you think:

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Pedaling isn’t smooth. At least not until you get enough practice that you’re able to pedal smoothly. Mehl described it to me as being more like mountain biking than like an indoor cycle with a flywheel, but even mountain bikes have a little bit of momentum. With Excy, you just push, and when you stop, the pedal stops. That’s all.

The bike isn’t always stable side-to-side. When you learn to pedal smoothly, the bike doesn’t wobble—so this is a similar issue to the one above. Excy also sells a $132 snap-on stability bar to eliminate wobbling. Attaching and detaching the bar is tricky, even with video instructions. For a while I thought it was stuck on forever, but then I realized you need to push in the buttons on both sides, not just one, to remove it.

There’s no handy readout to show your time or effort. Instead, there’s a...thermometer? Stay with me here. Since the resistance comes from friction, the bike physically heats up as you use it. The hotter it gets, the more energy you’ve put into working the machine. This actually makes a lot of sense, because it reflects training volume: a long easy workout and a very short, very hard workout might each reach the same temperature. Either way, you did the same amount of work in total. The thermometer doesn’t lie.

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The app is clunky and iOS only. Excy’s app comes with a configurable interval timer so you can design your own workout, and a series of programmed interval workouts that play an audio track telling you what to do while displaying a visual overview of the workout: yellow bars for easy, orange for medium, red for hard.

Both types will ask for your starting and ending temperature, which lets the app calculate your calorie burn. But there’s no way to add a manual workout, or to edit a workout you’ve already completed. The app also doesn’t keep the screen awake, so if you get really into your workout you may find that your phone is dark and you’ve only logged a few minutes. It would be great to be able to watch a workout video while logging the corresponding workout, but that’s not an option in the app.

The Bottom Line: Like a Real Exercise Bike, But Smaller

Is the Excy worth buying? That depends on what you’re looking for. If you just want a simple cycle for while you’re working, the DeskCycle does that job cheaper. If you want to do workouts in your living room because you can’t always make it to the gym, Sworkit and YouTube are there for you.

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The sweet spot for Excy is probably a person who wants to do cycling workouts, and who has the budget to consider a full sized exercise bike but not the space for one. (Cynical upside: it’s too small to become an unwieldy clothing rack.) It’s also great if you want to keep up with cardio but have an injury or disability that affects your legs.

I enjoyed my time with Excy. I did a bunch of interval workouts on days when I couldn’t run, and did some quick sessions as breaks from work. The price is very steep, but this gadget has a lot of upsides in a small package.